gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: The radiosurgical department at the University Cancer Center (UCT) moves from paper based records and institute-operated databases to a professional data collection system to improve accessibility and data transfer. Moreover, the data should be related to all other multimodal treatment results, hence, clinical research, quality assurance and benchmarking are based on prospective data management.

Additionally, we work towards the goal of the Medical Informatics Initiative Germany to better utilize clinical data inside a university hospital as well as across institutional boundaries. MIRACUM (Medical Informatics in Research and Care at University Medicine) as one of the funded consortium, where the University Hospital Frankfurt is an associate, aims to create a data integration centre (DIC) to improve the accessibility [1].

Methods: A registry is a disease specific medical documentation of health-related data. It supports clinical research and benefits quality assurance, improvement and description of epidemiological coherences [2]. The Open-Source Registry System for Rare Disease (OSSE) provides all necessary features and consists among other components of a metadata repository (Samply.MDR), that is also part of the MIRACUM DIC. Metadata describe the structure and representation of the data, which enables interoperability [3]. Furthermore, the share component offers a REST interface and an export via XML or CSV [4].

The UCT uses CentraXX®, which is a software solution for biobanks, as a data warehouse to collect all clinical data.

Result: A concept of data integration was implemented at the radiosurgery department with OSSE registry as a data capturing and integration tool. According to the specifications, three electronic data capture forms (eCRF) with selection depending views were designed. Those contain basic data of the patient as well as treatment data including its indication, planning and follow-up data. To transfer the data from the local OSSE registry to the CentraXX® system, a manual XML-based ETL-process (extract, transform and load) has been implemented. Selected data of OSSE can be exported in an CentraXX® compatible XML-file and imported into CentraXX®.

Discussion: By using OSSE, data access and data quality is ensured through access rights and structured data acquisition. Registry users have complete monitoring and sovereignty of the information to analyze or generate reports, likewise the data are accessible for further processes, like billing.

For now, we demonstrated a manual data transfer process from a local OSSE registry to CentraXX®, however any data warehouse system can be used. Our next step will be to implement an OSSE extension to generate an automated ETL-process and therefore provide a data integration. This could be used to integrate data from OSSE to a DIC, as well. Hence, the radiosurgical department would be a blueprint and can be applied to other departments.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.